Perhaps the methods of doing business you’ve set up aren’t doing the trick as much as you would like. Maybe you simply want to ensure that you’re squeezing every penny you can out of your market. Some businesses might see that as a sign to go through the long process of creating whole new products and services. However, you can get smarter and open new revenue streams based on what you already have, instead.

Expand your lead building

There are a lot of different ways to build leads on the internet and outside of it and there’s a good chance that you haven’t fully explored all your options yet. Online, have you made use of SEO, PPC, content marketing, and the plethora of available methods? If you’re mostly doing your business online, have you considered how making a real appearance through trade shows and other events could help you reach audiences you haven’t thoroughly explored yet? Keep looking for new ways to build those leads.

Sell to your friends

One way to expand those leads is through the people that are already your customers. Word-of-mouth is always powerful, but waiting for them to spread the word isn’t always the most efficient. For instance, using a gift card template is a simple method to create a new revenue stream based on the social aspect of spending with very little investment required. Setting up a referral system might require a little more investment, but besides incentivizing word-of-mouth, rewarding discounts on future purchases for the referrer gives them more reason to keep coming back. You can build a new lead as you retain an old one.

Give more bang for their buck

Based on that logic of widening existing revenue streams instead of opening entirely new ones, retaining customers is important. Getting them to spend more often isn’t necessarily difficult, either. Just as referrals can offer them more value for being a customer, setting up a loyalty system can work just as well. Whether that’s offering them points or giving them more exclusive rewards, you have to decide how much you’re willing to invest in retaining your customers. The more value for them, the more likely they are to make use of such reward schemes.

Take it on the road

If you’re in the business of services as opposed to products, then sometimes a demonstration is just what you need to close more sales. To that end, you shouldn’t always expect people to take the first step and come to you. Especially in IT, you sometimes need to help them thoroughly understand the value on offer before you really have their interest. Turning your business into a traveling workshop can help you more thoroughly explore the market and make it a lot more convenient for businesses that might show an interest.

On some occasions it may, in fact, be time to look at new products and services. But don’t jump the gun before considering if the above methods could help you optimize your current revenue streams. It’s not an efficient way to do business.

When we track down an SEO agency that finally fits the bill, conveys the right message and checks out against a pile of references they’ve thrown our way, the battle is won and we can now get on with the challenges of being a business without the online clap-trap, right?

Well, not really.

Leaving your online presence and eventual income charts in the sticky hands of an SEO agency is risky, even in the best of circumstances and relationships; SEO is an industry that changes quickly, with an average of two algorithm changes being processed by Google every day.

While they stay on top of things and fling us through reports, our eyes should scan the page and critically measure their performance, based on the three following indicators.

Are You Coming or Going? Traffic Comparisons

“So, (your name), as you can see here, your traffic numbers have improved substantially over the last few months, doubling last year’s figures!”

“But we didn’t have analytics tracking installed last year…”

Sound familiar?

*Crickets*

SEO professionals are trained, semantic artists, often finding the positive spin in a report and embellishing the details. Whilst shopping around, make sure you carefully select an ethical company like Search Factory to represent and hone your online interests.

If you’ve already taken the leap and plunged into a dotted line fiasco, ask to see a traffic comparison in an easy to understand format over the last month against the preceding month, the last three months, fluctuations over six months and comparisons to the previous year (if you have data dating back that far).

If they dance around these figures and neglect to provide you with meaningful information, something shady may be going on and your money may be invested better elsewhere.

Up, Up and Gone Away? Climbing the Rankings

When was the last time you set eyes on a keyword report that didn’t bore you to tears and lead you to tear your hair out with confused frustration?

Agencies can be fond of over-feeding clients information they don’t need to process, hoping to distract their focus from a complete lack of results across the board.

Make sure your report includes an easy to understand table of keyword rankings (and know which keywords you’d like to be ranking for!), complete with increased or decreased search volume, converting keywords and dead keywords.

A competent specialist will guide you through what everything means, pulling parts together into one cohesive picture that doesn’t make you want to throw your computer out the window.

If your agency doesn’t have time (or make time) to sit down with you and drill into keyword reporting, you need to question whether you are really their priority; there’s nothing worse than being taken for a ride and paying a premium mark-up for the pleasure.

Backlinks? What Backlinks?

Upon opening an SEO report, a range of indicators should automatically be indexed or at least apparent as the pages roll on.

If your reports lack any evidence of back-linking, from process to mention, pick up the phone and demand more information.

Chances are, your nominated SEO company has completely neglected a very important facet of ramping up sustained rankings. Think of the Internet as a mega-city; you have ghettos and caravan parks, middle class dwellings and specialists, expensive neighbourhoods and affluent areas – link building allows SEO agencies to tap into this embedded social hierarchy and put your brand in touch with the right people, managing not only your online reputation, but audience perception through association.

The absence of these negotiations is not only preventing your company from climbing a very competitive exposure ladder, it may work against you in the future, as you struggle to play catch up to competitors who have made smart choices in link building activities and grown a strong following or a database of highly ranked websites.

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot before you get started!

Everybody has an opinion. So what about the rest of us? What do you think SEO agencies should include on reports, or do you have a horror story to share with me? Thoughts, ideas, anecdotes are welcome!

About the author of this blog post

Jessica Hannah is a part of the team at Search Factory, a leading Brisbane SEO agency.

According to reputable sources, thousands of computer users may lose Internet access on Monday, when the deadline for a temporary fix to a malicious software scam shut down by the FBI last year expires.

What is it?

Millions of computers were infected with the so-called “Internet Doomsday” virus used in the hacking scam, which redirected Internet searches through DNS servers used by the scammers. (Who, in turn, allegedly netted $14 million in bogus advertising revenue.) After U.S. and Estonian authorities busted the malware ring last November, a federal judge ordered that the FBI use temporary servers while the malware victims’ PCs were repaired. The temporary servers will shut down at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Monday, meaning anyone using a computer still infected with the virus will likely lose Internet access.

“Connectivity will be lost to the Internet PERIOD,” Symantec, the online security firm, said in a blog post. “If your computer is still using DNS entries that are pointing to the FBI servers on July 9, you will lose TOTAL access to the Internet. No connecting to the office from home, no updating Facebook, nothing until the DNS settings are fixed.”

Our Internet strategies are legitimate, proven systems avoiding trying to ‘cheat the system’ with ‘black hat strategies’. They work in all industries for companies of all shapes and sizes that have real products and services to offer.

The best part of the strategies is that they can be setup with a passive income aspect so that traffic is generated ‘automatically’ and systematically to feed the sales funnel. Most of the strategies and tools we use are FREE and require no internal IT resources.

If you’re interested in making money 24/7/365, contact us for a quick chat and we’ll explain how we’ve helped hundreds of small business owners become market dominant leaders within their market niches within 12 to 24 months.

As you are receiving e-mail, it’s wise to remember how easily this wonderful technology can be misused, sometimes unintentionally and with serious consequences.

Consider the case of the Michigan man who left the snow-filled streets of Detroit for a vacation in Florida. His wife was on a business trip and was planning to meet him there the next day. When he reached his hotel, he decided to send his wife a quick e-mail.

Unable to find the scrap of paper on which he had written her e-mail address, he did his best to type it in from memory. Unfortunately, he missed one letter and his note was directed instead to an elderly preacher’s wife, whose husband had passed away only the day before. When the grieving widow checked her e-mail, she took one look at the monitor, let out a piercing scream, and fell to the floor in a dead faint. Hearing the scream, her family rushed into the room and saw this note on the screen:

This is a very sad day. The world has lost a force of pure creativity, innovation and genius that changed the world as we know it. What a fabulous legacy he has left behind, motivating so many to follow and create their dreams. He has been a source of inspiration for me from the very beginning… I still can’t believe it.

More than 300 Australian marketers were surveyed through independent research with the report also revealing 89% of companies don’t use tools to assess how people use their sites.

Moreover, the companies surveyed spend 40% of their budget attracting traffic to their website.

Some 30% of marketers either do not evaluate the success of their website or only evaluate on an annual basis.

A further 25% assess their website biennially. This lack of engagement and measurement of their websites means most marketers have no idea what small simple changes could be made to their websites to increase sales.

Isn’t this alarming?

So how do you stack up to these stats?

If you want help to grow your online presence and bottom-line results, give us a call. We have a RESULTS GUARANTEEDPlatinum Program that will have you out-performing and out-selling your competitors in no time – if you qualify!

As we know, seniors are adopting the “Interweb” like never before, so if you’re sending texts to them as part of a multi media campaign, you should use the most recent codes, sent to me courtesy of Andrew Powell of Montreal, Canada.

A lot of people debate the pros and cons of Social Media, what I have come to call Social NOTworking – where people waste countless hours exchanging posts, chats, pokes, photos and other electronic elements with people they wouldn’t be caught dead with face-to-face. But that’s my personal bias AND I am not saying that Social Media is not worth doing – it is, but not for the reasons MOST people think…

That’s a discussion for another day and one I reserve for my paying clients to help them out-perform their peers by doing out-of-the-ordinary things that create extra-ordinary results.

Results that baffle their competitors – BECAUSE they (the competitors) have no clue…. Shhh! It’s called Stealth Marketing and means they can’t copy what you’re doing!

In support of my bias, I came across recent reports that continue to show that website traffic from social media networks is still pretty low.

SeeWhy studied 60,000 ecommerce transactions across a variety of sites in February 2011. Since running an online store is about selling things, they looked at only the people who actually loaded items into their shopping cart. Here’s one of the summary results:

Email Marketing Generates More Buyer Traffic Than Social Media

Email Marketing Still Outperforms Social Media

As you can see, email brought in the most traffic, with direct and search significantly less. Social media came in at only 4.3%, not great, but better than display advertising, so that’s something to think about.

Next they took that info and charted the percentage of people from each source who completed their transaction. In other words, the people who handed over their credit card number and hit submit.

Email Marketing Converts To More Sales Than Social Media

If you want more sales, send more emails!

In the above pie chart you can clearly see that email and direct hits to the site still resulted in the best sales conversions, social media picked up a dismal 2.11% of the overall, but look at display advertising. Yikes, only 0.53% conversion rate? Maybe you should be spending money on your Facebook page rather than on display ads, but once again that’s a discussion for another day. Social NOTworking does have its place, but not where or how you might think. We explain this in our Killer Konversations™ Workshops if you’re interested…

At the end of all of this, SeeWhy does put in the usual disclaimer. Your mileage may vary and different types of ecommerce sites will have different results. While I understand that this is a study of ONLY 60,000 transactions, it supports my bias that email marketing still is the primary source for online sales.

There’s a fundamental reason – it’s a privileged conversation that people still value – as long as it’s not violated.

If you’re asking yourself why email marketing isn’t in the news more often, it’s because it simply isn’t as new and trendy as social media marketing.

The news “media” are always searching for new trends and buzzwords to fill their empty pages.

My clients don’t care about the buzz and hype – all they want is more people buying their products and services.

If that’s what you want – send them more emails – but not just any emails… That’s considered spam. You need to know what to send to whom.

Every once in a while I come across something that stands out. Today’s post is an example of a subtle question (13b) that puts the previous question into context. It’s the BEST SURVEY QUESTION I have read in several years. Leave it to Apple to do it – they know the value of feedback. They also understand and respect the CONTEXT and INTENT in which it’s given.

From Apple

When I meet with my clients, I go into substantially more detail than just highlighting something like this. There are two psychological constructs in play here that were outlined in substantial detail in two recent books I read. Books you would not come across in your airport or local bookstore.

This is what I do as The Exponential Growth Strategist – I seek out distinctions, nuances and explanations so my clients can tailor outstanding examples like this one in their businesses and/or careers. If you’d like to be coached or mentored and access this level of expertise, contact me. If you qualify, we’d love to have you in our RESULTS GUARANTEEDPlatinum Program.

If you have the need to translate text or documents, Google has a great translation tool. This is handy when you do a lot of blogging or have a lot of YouTube videos and someone posts a comment in a foreign language… It still has difficulty with vernacular, but it’s always improving!

Earlier this week, I blogged about how Vaseline and radioactivity are related to make a point – well actually, to illustrate how William Tucker has been able to reduce the fear mongering propaganda of the mass media to simple, easy-to-understand metaphors and analogies that any 5th grader can understand.